By Stephen PetrusThe Collection of Queens City Councilman Daniel Dromm, recently accessioned at the La Guardia and Wagner Archives, will benefit scholars, activists, curators, and policymakers researching LGBTQ studies and recent New York City history in general. Dromm, a Queens public school teacher from 1984 to 2009, was a founder of the Queens Lesbian and Gay Pride Committee and an organizer of the Queens Pride Parade and Festival, inaugurated in Jackson Heights in 1993. Elected to New York City Council in 2009, he represents Jackson Heights and Elmhurst in Queens and is one of two openly gay City Council members from the borough.

​The Dromm Collection consists of 24 boxes of documents, 30 multimedia videos, 160 artifacts, and some 3,000 photographs. The bulk ranges from 1990 to the early 2010s. It’s particularly strong on the origins and development of the Queens Pride Parade, containing photographs, correspondence, flyers, pamphlets, permits, registration material, and meeting notes. Artifacts include pins, Frisbees, clothing patches, and T-shirts.

Tom Glynn’s Reading Publics provides a richly detailed history of the development of libraries in New York City from the first -- the New York Society Library, founded in 1754 as a library for the new King’s College -- to the coalescence of the New York Public Library in 1911. In nine chapters, he examines a variety of institutions, including subscription, circulating, research, and collegiate libraries, giving a sense of the breadth of individual, corporate, and institutional sponsors who founded libraries in the city and the various purposes those libraries were to serve.

New York City’s oldest continuously operating library is the New York Society Library, currently located on 79th St. just east of Central Park. The Library was originally founded in 1754 but was forced to close for fourteen years during the lead up to the Revolutionary War, the British occupation of the city, and the ensuing Post-War depression.[1] It was re-founded in 1789 as part of the larger cultural revival of the city in the 1780s and has been open since. The library has always functioned on a subscription basis, with members providing the funds by which the library continues to operate and buy new books. Yet, the re-founding of the library was not just the reemergence of a lapsed cultural institution during the post-war recovery, it was also a part of larger debates about the cultural resources necessary to sustain the new national government.

Today marks the debut of FootNotes, a regular series of conversations with authors of recent works of New York history conducted by the historian Mason B. Williams. For the first installment, or interviewer spoke with Robert W. Snyder about his new book Crossing Broadway: Washington Heights and the Promise of New York City, the subject of The Gotham Center's December 10th event.

New York’s founding father -- by way of St. Croix and Nevis -— is in the midst of another comeback. An extraordinarily successful musical on Broadway, a debate about his place on the ten-dollar bill, and a great Gotham Center post about his impact on early American marine insurance law all provide new looks at one of the more contentious framers. But this is not the first revival of public interest in Alexander Hamilton. ​

Women at St. Michael’s Church in Flushing, Queens, prior to the start of the “La Naval de Manila” procession and ceremony

One of the hallmarks of the borough of Queens, New York is its incredible cultural diversity. Walk down any street or neighborhood and you will quickly encounter a language or custom other than your own. This diversity is part of what informs the identity of local communities and makes the tale of their history a rich tapestry weaving together different voices and stories into one. In order to preserve that history for future generations, those voices are now being recorded and made available to the public in a unique archive of collective memory known as the Queens Memory Project (QMP).